


TVOS Supplemental Works

by digitalcatnip



Series: The Value of Sparrows [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Biblical Reinterpretation, Gen, Hurricane Katrina, Mention of drug and alcohol abuse, Other, Panic Attacks, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Smoking, i'm amazed that's a tag?? lol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25744072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digitalcatnip/pseuds/digitalcatnip
Summary: Prompt fills, short scenarios, and other little short-form fics about Itza and Sorush from TVOS.  Will update tags as necessary!
Series: The Value of Sparrows [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1867471





	1. Prompt:  Watch (1985)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: none  
> words: 3397
> 
> _“Speaking of which, what time is it anyway? I gotta know when to start pregaming.”  
>  “Ah, you’ll have to wait til we pass by the bank, I’m afraid.”  
> Itza actually was stunned. “What? Where’s your watch?”  
> Sorush said something softly, under their breath, which was very uncharacteristic of them.  
> Itza cocked its head towards them. “What?”  
> “It’s broken,” Sorush said again, a bit louder._
> 
> Sorush's watch stops working, and Itza blames itself. Written as a prompt from a writing server I'm in, and also an excuse to get in that "Itza loves Halloween because it's the only time it can walk around without glasses" joke that I never managed to fit into the novella itself ;p

“Angel, have you seen my jacket?”

“The one with the making love quote on the back, or the one with the ophanim that looks very much like me with you intertwined through the wheels?”

Itza stuck its head through the archway leading from the formal dining room to the living room. “That second one.”

Sorush pretended they couldn’t see the flush in Itza’s cheeks from their spot on the couch where they were seated, flipping through a tome the thickness of their forearm that was most likely a list of every single beetle in North America. “It’s in my bedroom.”

Itza padded wordlessly through the hall and into the bedroom, not bothering to turn on the light, its eyes adjusting instantly to the darkness. It was night, the heavy curtain drawn so not even the light of the Upper West Side could penetrate them, casting the room in a darkness that a human would struggle to see in. But Itza was no human. Slitted pupils expanded, deepening the contrast between the light and the dark, until everything was crystal clear in perfect black and white.

The duvet was thrown back and the pillows strewn across the mattress, but not from Sorush, being as they weren’t exactly keen on sleeping in general, viewing it more as a waste of time that could be spent looking at some bug or another. Itza had woken up here, the memory of how it had made its way up to Sorush’s second-floor apartment a bit fuzzy. But what else was new.

It moved across the room, weaving between the huge king-size bed frame and the writing desk to the ancient wardrobe to open it and peer inside. A few embroidered waistcoats, a pearl-coloured fur coat, and Sorush’s usual overcoat, the chain of their pocket watch clipped to the inside pocket. But no leather jacket. Itza reached inside the coat pocket, popping open the watch and checking the time. Fuck, it was going to be late.

Itza sighed and shut the wardrobe, wishing it could teleport things to it like the angel could. It used to be able to, back in the day. Now all it could do was make new things that tasted like a weird shade of yellow, no matter what the object was. Weird how the list of abilities of demons seemed simultaneously shorter and longer than the ones of angels.

Well clearly it wasn’t in here. Itza turned gave the room one last look, eyes sliding over the bed again, the wardrobe, the writing desk; the controlled chaos of calligraphy tools, field guides, and sketchbooks dating back to the 1200s, held together by metaphorical spit but literal prayers. 

“Okay, I’m lost, just snap the goddamn jacket for me so I can go out,” Itza said, stomping back into the living room.

“Only if you stop walking like you are still wearing very heavy boots,” Sorush said, setting the book down onto the coffee table (which was still exactly where Itza had left it in 1969, tasting more of Sorush now than that infernal yellow.) “I’m not exactly keen on a letter left on the door from my downstairs neighbour.”

Sorush raised their hand and snapped, and with a small “whoosh” of the previously unoccupied air rushing out of the way, the jacket appeared draped over the angel’s arm. The air smelled of ozone and acrid smoke.

“Good grief, what on earth were you doing last night?” Sorush said, grimacing, holding their arm out away from their face. “This thing smells atrocious. You smoke a lot but not _ this  _ much.”

“Damned if I know, I just remember waking up in your bed,” Itza said, plucking the jacket from Sorush’s arm. It took a deep, open-mouthed whiff of the leather, letting the colours roll around in its mouth for a moment before exhaling. “Ah, that’d be a combination of last night’s staff meeting and drinking it off at the bar.”

“That explains the stench,” Sorush said, sagely. “And I’m guessing your new assignment from Downstairs isn’t amicable to whatever it is you were planning on spending your time doing this month?”

“Actually, they were just so thrilled I actually showed up in Mexico that they gave me the month off.”

“Oh, well that’s nice.”

Itza scowled. “Yeah, but I don’t trust Be-elzebub any further than I could throw ‘em. I bet you ten bucks they’re blowing my phone up tomorrow wanting me to go whack heads in some other war-torn country.”

“One of the few times I am thankful that Heaven operates like a Fortune 500 company,” Sorush said. “Everything is so bureaucratic, but at least your vacations are typically honoured. Even ones you didn’t ask to be on, apparently.”

“Yeah but I get to deck my coworkers when they’re being little shits.”

“Every job has its pros and cons. My office doesn’t smell like rotten eggs and dead animals.”  
“Speak for yourself, I happen to _like_ the smell of dead animals; it’s a very nice, relaxing shade of deep green, like what I’m pretty sure pine trees still look like. I imagine Heaven probably smells like that beige they’ve painted the interior of every single government building built since the mid-70s - absolutely boring.”

“Next time I visit I’ll be sure and bring back a pen or something for you to sniff and you can let me know.”

“Yes, well, hopefully we’re still together in the next millennia and you’ve not gotten tired of me and cast me to the wayside in favour of someone else.”

Sorush blinked. “Why on earth would I do that?”

Itza slipped the jacket on over its shoulders, shielding its face. “It was a joke, angel.”

“I did not find it very funny,” Sorush said. “Especially not after that night at the Royal Society ball.”

“Oh, that was over a hundred years ago, it’s ancient history. I’ve definitely moved on.”

Sorush hummed in this way that told Itza that they did not believe it.

“It was a joke,” it repeated. “But I’m out. Got shit to do, Goldblum.”

“We still on for lunch?”

Itza gave them a grin from across the room as it snapped its sunglasses over its eyes. “Of course.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It was about the fourth time that Sorush had to drag Itza out of the way of a signpost when they finally brought it up.

“What is the point of not wearing your sunglasses when you don’t even keep your eyes open?”

Itza tried its best to look up at them, but it was just so goddamn bright outside. “It’s the only day I can, though. I gotta take advantage of it.”

“You would be walking around with a sign-shaped indention in your face if it weren’t for me,” Sorush quipped. “You may be able to see people and plants with your eyes closed, but you can’t see things made out of metal unless they are warmed by the sun.”

“Thank you for explaining how my heat vision works,” Itza grumbled.

“I am just ensuring that you understand why I am so confused as to why you would continue to not be able to see like a normal person and risk injuring yourself by running into cold metal poles.”

“Because it’s  _ Halloween _ ,” Itza said, exasperated. “I’ve been waiting centuries for humans to invent coloured contacts so I can actually exist without people being concerned about me having red snake eyes again! I’ve all but forgotten what the world looks like in glorious technicolour!”

“Itza, you’re colour-blind.”

“You know what I mean. It gets old having to look at everything behind dark lenses, it washes out all the contrast.”

“I’m surprised you can see any contrast with your eyes closed.”

Itza looked at them for a moment, shifting silver and gold in its extrasensory vision. “More than you think,” it said.

“Well it would definitely be nice if I didn’t have to keep you from making a fool of yourself every five minutes during our walk in the park.”

Itza sighed and reached into its jacket to retrieve a pair of large, round sunglasses. “Fine, angel. For you.”

“You’ll have more opportunity to exist in the real world once the sun goes down and all the bars open up,” Sorush said, patting Itza on the hand.

“Speaking of which, what time is it anyway? I gotta know when to start pregaming.”

“Ah, you’ll have to wait til we pass by the bank, I’m afraid.”

Itza actually was stunned. “What? Where’s your watch?”

Sorush said something softly, under their breath, which was very uncharacteristic of them.

Itza cocked its head towards them. “What?”

“It’s broken,” Sorush said again, a bit louder.

This nearly knocked the demon over. “It  _ what? _ I thought that watch was blessed and always tells the correct time and shit; how on earth could it have broken?”

“Just because it is blessed to always tell the correct time does not mean that its parts are infallible,” Sorush said. “I assume, anyway.”

“You  _ assume _ ?”

“Well it’s never broken  _ before _ , but that’s not to say it couldn’t happen.”

“Isn’t that watch made in Heaven? You would think those things would be like, y’know, indestructible or whatever.”

“That’s what one would think, and yet it’s stopped ticking.”

“Have you tried Germany?” Itza asked, trying very hard to remember anything about watches. “Or was it Italy that does watches. Or were they leather? I can’t remember.”

“I believe you’re thinking of Switzerland,” Sorush offered. “And I have considered it, but I am not sure if it is wise of me to hand a supernaturally made object to a human. I don’t want to incite any conspiracy theories if the mechanism doesn’t exactly conform to earth’s physics, or it blinds them by looking at it, or something. I’d hate to be responsible for putting, say, Tag Heuer, out of business.”

“You have a point,” mused Itza. “Though it would definitely cause some excellent chaos.”

“You are absolutely not allowed to tank one of the largest watchmakers in the world, you horrible demon.”

Itza crossed its arms in a comical pout. “No, but it’d be fun.”

Sorush put a hand over their jacket pocket, where the watch usually was. “Nevertheless, I am afraid that I will not be able to repair it without divine intervention, and I have not heard from Heaven in quite a long time. I am...not very good at the non-destruction part of things, unfortunately.”

“Unsurprising, considering you kept me in shoes for much of early history. I happen to be pretty good at that sort of thing, though, believe it or not.”

“Repairing watches?”

“Not watches, specifically, but I’m fairly proficient at little fiddly things like sewing and things like that. Got the magnifying glass eyeballs, you know. I bet I could figure it out.”

“Well you’re free to try next time you’re at my apartment, I suppose. I cannot promise it won’t burn or blind you or something, though. Historically, divine tools don’t treat demons very kindly.”

Itza side-stepped an historical marker signpost. “Don’t worry, if I go blind I’ll just use heat vision to get around.”

  
  
  
  
  


Sorush was not much for holidays in general, but Halloween was one of those that they had a bit of an affinity for, if not just because of all of the little demons and monsters that turned out on their doorstep. It felt a bit nostalgic, to tell the truth. Every year they put aside their annoyances with humans and let Itza put vinyl spider and ghost stickers all over the apartment door, and kept a bowl of candy on the umbrella stand for whenever someone gave a knock.

Once the candy was all placed within pumpkin-shaped plastic baskets and the porch light was turned off, Sorush took off their jacket, dug a thick, fluffy blanket out of the closet, set on the kettle, and settled down on the couch for the night with a novel they had been looking forward to cracking open for weeks. Itza was off at some party or another, getting very drunk and likely very high as well, and probably wouldn’t be seen until tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully it would at least go home instead of passing out in some alley like it used to do in the sixties.

They had shuffled into the kitchen in slippered feet to tend to the whistling kettle when there was the sound of a key turning in the deadbolt, followed by the slide of the front door along the linoleum entryway floor.

“Itza, is that you?” Sorush asked, peeking around the wall of the kitchen.

“Yeah, it’s me,” came Itza’s voice from the entryway, alongside the sound of it kicking off its boots.

“I didn’t expect to see you again until tomorrow at the earliest,” Sorush said, tuning back to the kettle. “Would you like tea?”

“I promised I’d look at your watch, didn’t I?”  
Itza slunk through the living room and into the kitchen, sliding up beside Sorush to rifle through their tea cabinet, holding each box and tin in front of its face and sticking out its tongue until it found one the colour it was vibing with that day. It handed Sorush a box of Irish Breakfast; a strange choice for nearly eleven at night, but Itza’s choices were rarely about the qualities of the teas themselves.

“You didn’t need to cut your celebrations short just to do me a favour,” Sorush said.

Itza shrugged. “I wasn’t really feeling the club scene tonight.”

“I can tell when you’re lying, you know.”

Itza frowned, staring deep into its cup of tea, watching the tannins seeping from the leaves in a gentle swirl. “You said that watch is divine, right?”

“Yes. Everyone in my platoon has one; they’re standard issue.”

The demon seemed to tense up before asking its next question. “Do you think, possibly, that it’s stopped working because of me?”

“Itza, that’s not-”

“You can’t prove it  _ isn’t _ , though. Like you said, no one knows what divine tools do to demons, or vice versa. The other day I checked the time on your watch, and now it’s not working. What if it’s freaking out because I touched it?”

Sorush sighed. “There really is no way to know, I suppose. But even if you did break my watch, it’s not the end of the world, Itza. I can always just get a regular human mechanical watch. We are not cursed to never know what time it is for the rest of eternity.”

“But you’ll have to wind it, and adjust for time zones, and all that other stuff you get to avoid with a blessed watch. All I did was check the time, and now I’ve gone and inconvenienced you for the unforseeable future.”

“Itza,” Sorush said, pressing its cup of tea into its hands. “It’s just a watch.”

“It’s just a watch  _ now _ .”

“Even if every single divine object I own breaks the second you look in its direction, they’re all still just _ things _ , and things don’t matter, really.”

“But-”

Sorush pushed the teacup to Itza’s mouth. “Hush. I’ll look at the watch tomorrow, and if it’s broken, it’s broken. For the time being, the microwave will do the job of telling me how much longer I have until you wake up yelling for breakfast.”

Itza accepted the drink of tea, letting the colours roll around in its mouth. This was one of its favourites - maybe the caffeine wasn’t a great idea so late at night, but it tasted like an incredibly soothing deep blue, like the sky just before it grows dark. It reminded Itza of sitting on the rooftops in London, watching the sunset with a cigarette in its hand. Of waking up at twilight in Australia, watching the silhouette of Sorush’s wings as they hunched over their sketchbooks.

“I’m sorry,” it said softly. “I just...forget, sometimes. That we don’t actually fit together quite like I think we do.”

“We fit together fine,” Sorush said, sipping on their own tea. “Now, I would invite you to join me on the couch to watch those terrible horror movies they’ve been showing lately, but you are covered in a frankly  _ hellish  _ amount of glitter, and I don’t think even my holy abilities could get that out of the upholstery.”

Itza allowed itself to be pushed toward the bathroom door. “Do not come out until you have eradicated every single flake. I’ll make sure your tea stays warm.”

  
  
  
  
  


Itza stayed at Sorush’s again that night, curled up in their very plush and luxurious bed that they had never slept in a single night for as long as Itza had known them. It woke up to the smell of fresh coffee drifting underneath the door, rousing it with a bit more pep than usual.

“Good morning,” Sorush said, handing Itza a steaming cup, already supplemented with creamer. “Look what I’ve gotten working once more.”

It was then that Itza realized that Sorush was actually smiling. Much like their other expressions, it was subtle, but Itza had thousands of years to learn their face, to see the little upwards turn of their lips, the way their eyes literally glowed with excitement. 

The angel reached within their jacket pocket and revealed a certain gold pocket watch, embossed with the interlocking wheels of the Ophanim. They pressed the button on the top with their thumb, popping it open to reveal the watch’s face. It was, presumably, ivory; the face pale, with Roman numerals the same shade of metal as the hunter-case engraved into the bone. In the centre, where the arms joined together, the face was transparent, revealing a little glimpse into the movement behind it. A movement which was currently, well. Moving.

Itza reached out to grab the watch but thought better of it and grabbed Sorush’s hand instead, pulling the watch closer to its face. “It’s working again!”

“That it is,” Sorush said, beaming. “And I didn’t even have to reset the time when it came back to life.”

Itza turned Sorush’s hand all which-ways, looking the watch over. “Would ya look at that.”

“There was a rather large amount of dust within the gears,” Sorush said, a bit embarrassed. “It looked like the underneath of your couch inside there. It seems that while its time-telling abilities are infallible, it’s mechanics still require the occasional cleaning.”

“So it wasn’t me.”

“It appears that way.”

“I’m still not touching it.”

“That is your choice, but there is no real evidence that you have any ill effect upon it. In fact, there is more evidence that _ I  _ am more dangerous to the longevity of my timepiece, seeing as there was sand inside there that I’m pretty sure would carbon-date back to prehistory.”

Sorush closed the watch’s cover with a soft click, Itza’s hands still around their own. “Also, in case you were still curious, there appears to be nothing in the movement that would destroy a human. Or a demon.”

Itza had a look on its face like it was going to be sick, but Sorush knew what that meant. They could feel it buzzing up from Itza’s fingertips, like static electricity. The thing it still wasn’t ready to admit, and they wouldn’t push. They had time, after all. All the time in the world.

“Well I’m glad you got it working, after all,” Itza said, letting go of Sorush’s hands and turning back to its coffee. “I was honestly dreading the possibility of having to listen to you bitch about how inaccurate human clocks were. God forbid you miss your five PM exactly tea.”

“Oh, I might still get one, just for fun. They make ones with lights in them now, so I wouldn’t even need you to read it for me in the dark anymore.”

“Shit, that’d be fantastic! Imagine it, being able to go on a walk at night without you shoving something in my face to read every five minutes, gosh. I’d be so free. Might just break your watch for real just so I can finally know peace.”

Sorush gave it another smile, but this one was not quite so warm. “I can forgive accidents, but if you touch any of my belongings with malevolence, I will smite you where you stand.”

Itza was not exactly ready to confront the way the sight of Sorush threatening it made it feel.


	2. Prompt:  Theft (2019)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> words: 2803  
> warnings: none
> 
> _“Hey, what colour is this?” it asked, holding up the cup.  
>  “White, why?”  
> “What colour is this bit?” It tapped the inside rim.  
> “Gold.”_
> 
> Sorush makes good on their promise to bring back something from heaven to smell. Takes place almost immediately after the end of the novella, so mild spoilers! Written as another prompt fill from the writing discord.

“Hold your hand out.”

Itza did so, wincing as the skin stretched along the burns that branched up its arm like the roots of some great tree.

“Fingers,” Sorush said.

Itza wiggled its fingers ever so slightly and attempted to extend them. This, too, hurt like a bitch. But not as bad as yesterday. “Still sucks.”

“I imagine,” Sorush said, running a finger along the palm of Itza’s hand. Itza barely felt it. “But it is healing. Slowly, but surely.”

“Just wish I knew why it was taking so goddamn long.”

Itza flexed its hand, unnerved by how little feeling it felt. The palm was almost entirely melted, no more handprints to be found, and no idea whether or not they would ever come back. While angels and demons were perfectly capable of healing themselves (and one another, Itza and Sorush found,) this wound was something different. Itza’s magic couldn’t touch it, and it fact made it hurt more whenever it’d tried. And everything Sorush threw at it seemed to simply bounce off.

“Well, it’s not because you’re a demon,” they said, gently encouraging the digits to extend a little further. “I’ve healed you dozens of times.”

“Maybe I’m a Nephilim now, or something,” Itza said, trying to be humorous through the pain. “Too evil for your magic, not evil enough for mine.”

“Or maybe it is because you were injured by a holy weapon, and they are designed not to harm angels, so the wound cannot be healed by angelic magic,” Sorush said. “Maybe it's a kind of failsafe.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only demon who’s ever held and angel’s sword and lived, so there’s no fuckin’ telling.”

Sorush sighed. “You are unique, that is for sure.”

Itza pulled its hand away from Sorush's. “Okay, enough of that. I gave Hell the finger so they’d _stop_ torturing me; that doesn’t mean you get to take up the slack.”

Sorush clicked their tongue. “Oh hush, I’m not torturing you. If I wanted to torture you I’d just pull you back apart and connect your eyeballs to your fingertips or something.”

Itza stared at them. “You can do that?”

“I have no idea, but I could find out.” They turned and walked into the kitchenette, filling the kettle with water. “I’ll make you tea.”

The little house by the glacier had seen some improvements since Sorush’s last visit. There was a rug, for one, now, and a front porch on which to remove one’s boots before coming inside. The cabinets that before only held tea now had salt and spices to season what Itza brought home and cooked over the fire. Snapping in a television was a bit too frivolous of a miracle for Sorush, but Itza had gotten them to at least procure its laptop from the apartment in New York, and they spent their evenings with it propped up on the tea table, watching Netflix until Itza fell asleep on Sorush’s shoulder. They’d been there a month. It wasn’t quite home, but for a vacation slash recovery cabin, it was hitting the spot, for now.

Itza continued to try to move its fingers, to focus on any sensation other than burning and nerve pain, trying to get its shitty vessel’s body to fix itself faster so it could use that arm again. It ran an unruined finger around the first joint of its right pinkie, where the metal from the snake-shaped ring it used to wear there had glowed white-hot, branding its skin even deeper than the Lichtenberg figure. It had worn rings on other fingers, too, but those had simply melted off of its hand. They probably were still there, on the dirty concrete floor of Hell - glittering gold and silver pools that nobody wanted to touch for fear of exploding into holy fire and lightning like Itza had.

Of course it’d had to grab that goddamn sword with its dominant hand, hadn’t it.

Sorush handed it tea that smelled like the sky on a warm summer’s day, which was probably intentional considering it was abysmal outside: overcast and gloomy, gray clouds hanging low in the sky. The overlay of blue behind Itza’s eyes made it almost believable that the sun would come out eventually.

“It looks like snow again,” Sorush said, pattering back into the kitchenette to rummage through the new pantry in search of something or other.

“Mmhm.”

“Winters here are lovely though, especially on clear nights. I spent a lot of time watching the stars last time I was here.” They gave Itza a soft glance from the kitchen. "And the aurora, of course."

Itza remembered drinking green and gold, the heat of Sorush’s breath on its face, the song of the aurora ringing in its ears. “The last time you were here?”

“Yes, in the 1800s. After the Great Plague. I spent a great deal of time becoming a doctor while you were wearing fancy coats and hunting foxes, but first I took a couple decades off to think about things. I remembered you telling me that I could get frostbite even if I didn’t feel it, so I made myself a little house to sit and stew inside of.”

Suddenly Itza realized that the house tasted of a faded bronze. “Somehow I knew you didn’t buy this from the local realtors’ on your way up from Hell.”

“Personally I think it’s the highlight of my architectural career. I even remembered to give it shutters on the windows.”

“I’m honestly surprised you remembered to give it _windows_.”

“How else will I see the local flora and fauna? One can only rage at God for so long before they need to start cataloguing things again.”

Itza smiled, despite itself. “Of course.”

It was awkward, drinking with its left hand. It brought the teacup to its face but missed, bumping the edge into its lip and teeth with a clink. In a comedy of errors, it jerked its hand back, sloshing tea all into its lap, then immediately lost grip on the teacup and pitched it across the room, where it shattered against the floor.

Itza sat there for a moment, staring at its hand, stunned. “Well that was something,” it said finally, shaking hot droplets from its hand.

Outside of the original home improvements, neither had been using miracles; since they'd both tester hastily quit their jobs, they weren't sure if they still had unlimited usage of miracles. It wasn’t worth the risk of using them all on things such as cleaning up spilled tea, when they may be needed for something else someday. It had taken days of whining to get Sorush to snap the laptop, though they did admit to enjoying having it around for a bit of background noise. But no magic meant doing things like cleaning spills the hard way.

Sorush refused to let it stand and pick up the shards itself, pushing the demon back into the cushions with one strong arm. Itza marveled at the methodical way they cleaned, so precise and perfect, befitting of someone like them, who spent their time organizing and cataloguing tiny, skittering things. 

“I’ll make you a new cup,” Sorush said, touching a hand to Itza’s knee before walking off to the kitchen once more.

“You really don’t need to.”

“I promised you tea for doing well at your physical therapy, and I am an angel of my word. Now sit. You need to rest and recover."

Itza sighed. It was tired of being this fucking tired, but apparently that’s what happens when you hold a lightning bolt, it screws up your entire body. Sorush had told it before that its arm was close to shattering from the involuntary muscle spasms it had endured. Probably the only reason it could even still _see_ was because it wasn’t human to begin with. At least it was quiet in its mind, this far away from civilization.

Sorush handed Itza a new cup of tea as it began to snow outside, a thin blanket developing over the frozen ground outside. “Here, it’s the same colour as the last one.”

It was a little harder to believe that the sky was blue this time, as the flakes got fatter, piling up against the foundation of the house in little drifts. Sorush sat down next to Itza, a steady weight to its left, a gentle clink of their teacup on their saucer.

“Soon the sun won’t be back up at all,” Sorush said. “Have you ever stayed a winter in the Arctic before?”

Itza shook its head. “Closest I’ve been is that one time the Nazis tried to march on Russia in the winter.”

“That definitely happened more than once.”

“Yeah, well. I was only _involved_ once. Other than that I prefer to stay below the Circle. No daylight for three months just means I’m taking a ninety day nap.”

As it spoke, the colours of the room around it seeped into its mouth. Blue and gold and green and...a kind of strange gray-beige?

It looked at the cup in its hand finally, holding it out to get a good view of the design of it. It felt strange in its hand now, it noticed, and not just because it was holding it with its nondominant one. The two of them had been using the same teacups and mugs for a good decade now, and Itza didn’t recognize this one at all. The inside was plated in something metallic, and the outside had feathery-looking detailing that Itza could feel with its thumb. It was quite unique, compared to Sorush’s usual taste in china.

“Hey, what colour is this?” it asked, holding up the cup.

“White, why?”

“What colour is this bit?” It tapped the inside rim.

“Gold.”

Itza held the cup up and looked underneath it, hoping to find a brand or artisan’s stamp that would glean some information. “I don’t recognize this one-”

It cut itself off, because the stamp on the bottom of the cup was written in a language Itza hadn’t seen in thousands of years.

“Sorush,” it said, which caused the angel to actually look up for real this time - Itza did not often refer to them by name. “This is written in Enochian.”

It was different, to be fair. The spelling was slightly off from what Itza remembered, and the handwriting was definitely not as ornate as what used to be the average. In fact, it felt a bit like the reverse of a modern human reading Old English. Itza only knew how to speak in the angelic equivalent of thees and thous, but this stamp basically read “made by ya boi Haniel on day 22636985.”

“Is that how they speak up there these days?” it asked, after reading off the stamp aloud.

“Language evolves in Heaven as it does on Earth,” Sorush said sagely. “I’m sure Demonic is not the same you spoke back when you first fell, either.”

“I finally understand what old humans mean when they complain about not understanding what the kids are saying,” Itza said, grimacing.

“It was strange to hear when I went up to join ranks, true,” Sorush said. “I was lined up next to a fairly young Ophanim and he may as well have been speaking Biloxi for as much I understood him. Even Michael had a strange accent to me.”

Itza's voice was quiet. “I didn’t know you actually joined ranks.”

Sorush set their cup and saucer on the tea table. “All the way to the war room, I’m afraid. I snuck out after Gabriel’s, ah, _distraction_. I don’t think anyone missed me, though, to tell the truth. I barely even got a greeting when I landed in the barracks, and they hadn't seen me in five thousand years. They just handed me my uniform and told me to get hopping.”

Itza gave the teacup in its hand a good sniff. “So this came from Heaven.”

“Yes. I made myself a drink before coming to find you.”

“Ah, yes, every proper gentleman needs their cuppa before coming haul their partner out of the literal pits of Hell.”

“Hush, I needed something to calm my nerves. I had no idea where you were or what I was getting myself into by traveling to you; for all I know they were holding you ransom or something with hellfire in their hands waiting for me.”

“So you stole a cup as a good luck charm.”

Sorush huffed. It was quite a lot of emotion for them. “I did not steal the cup! I am an angel, I cannot steal cups. I fully intend to return it.”

Itza sipped the last of its tea smugly. “I’m sure you do.”

“It is impossible for me to sin in any way, including lying,” Sorush said. “I _will_ return the cup.”

“When?”

“Whenever I remember.”

“You’re remembering now.”

“You are currently drinking tea from it. It would be rude to snap it out of your hands mid use, as it would if I were to send it back without washing it first.”

“Which is just long enough to forget about this conversation and go on automatic while washing it,” Itza sneered. “How wicked of you.”

“Additionally, we agreed to reserve my miracles for when they are needed, so it’s not smart to use one up to send home a single teacup,” Sorush said. “Plus, I did promise you I’d bring you something to smell so you would know what colour Heaven was.”

Itza studied the cup again, scowling. “Well, it tastes like a McMansion. Certainly prettier in monochrome.”

“Now you know.”

“But,” it continued, twirling the empty cup around its finger. “I’ll keep it if you want it.”

“Itza, you don’t-”

Itza shrugged. “Unlike you, I can do that, steal things. If _I_ steal it, you won’t have to give it back, or worry about repercussions for dragging your feet on returning it. I won’t gift it to you or anything, but we live together, so you can use it whenever you want. Say I took it from you in revenge for being thrown out, or something.”

“You don’t need to sin on my behalf, you know.”

Itza continued to twirl the teacup dramatically. “Wouldn’t want you to end up like me, is all. Black’s not your colour, I’m afraid. You’d look dreadful in a demon’s uniform. Plus, the first time you forget that snapping makes fire instead of appearing things from thin air you’re likely to burn the entire apartment building down.”

“I didn’t think demons could be selfless," Sorush said, a bit sarcastically.

“I’m not being selfless, I’m being greedy,” Itza barked, offended. “A cup made in Heaven is a rare commodity, you know. Literally priceless.”

“So that whole thing about you not wanting me to end up like you...?”

Colour was starting to creep up along Itza’s neck. “That’s...just me not wanting you to start infringing upon my territory. There’s only enough room on this glacier for one goth, you know.”

Sorush hummed, knowingly. “I think you may be defying odds again,” they said softly.

“Clearly you fucked around in my head while you were putting my arm back together,” Itza said. “Made me nice.”

The angel plucked the teacup from Itza’s finger, setting it on the tea table next to their own. “Even if I knew how to do that - which I don’t, by the way - I wouldn’t have done it,” they said, softly. “The thought never even crossed my mind, to tell the truth. I suppose I could have dug a little, seen if I could have found the switch that is flipped to change you from demon to angel once more, but really, I didn’t really think that it was anything that needed to be fixed.”

Itza leveled the finger it had been twirling the cup on at Sorush's nose. “I am holding fast to my belief that you have been slowly corrupting me over the years and that’s why I love you.”

“You love me because you think I manipulated you into loving me, or you love me because manipulating you to love me is a bit of a bastard move, and that’s the sort of thing you like.”

“Yes.”

Sorush leaned over and rubbed the neat cap of buzzed red fluff that covered Itza's head with one hand, smiling as the demon’s eyes closed involuntarily and it leaned into their touch. “Regardless of the reason, you are unlike anyone else I know, and for that, I love you too.”

Itza made a face. “You’ve gotta stop with that romantic shit, angel. One of these days I’m gonna kiss you and you aren’t going to like it.”

Sorush put their forehead against Itza’s, soft and warm and golden in the fading light. “Try me.”


	3. Prompt:  Below the Water Line (2348 BCE)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: none  
> words: 2623
> 
> _Yehudiah had never seen a demon before, but that was clearly the only explanation for what it was seeing._
> 
> Yehudiah has a nap and wakes up to someone new on its mountain. Another prompt fill for the writing server, this time a prequel to the main storyline!

It was almost restful, the flood.

_ Almost  _ being the key word. That first night was absolutely, literally, the worst night of Yehudiah’s life. It had been having a great time walking around what would eventually be Cape Town and experiencing all of the many many things that existed (wow, what a novel concept, existence!) when it had received a most unwelcome tap on the top of its head by some big-headed angel with a big fancy sword and was told politely to head to Mesopotamia, because God was getting ready to give the humans what for. Once it remembered where Mesopotamia was, Yehudiah obeyed, popping around a few times before finding exactly what part of the region it was supposed to be in.

It had been here before, it remembered, once or twice, anyway. It wasn’t the only soul guide anymore now that humans were starting to creep out from all corners of the globe, but it still spent most of its time in Africa where it had started work. There were plenty of things to do here, plenty of souls to guide. Most of them were people who had fallen ill or been killed by a beast they were hunting. Those, while not particularly pleased to be dead, were at least understanding. Hard to argue with illness. Occasionally you had someone like that one fellow beaten to death by his brother that was very very angry about being dead, requiring Yehudiah to wrangle him with words in Enochian (you can’t disobey an angel when it speaks to you in that way, their language has power,) before leading him on his way. Sometimes they were infants, not old enough to form words, that had to be carried to the afterlife, their souls warm and weighty in Yehudiah’s arms. Its favourites were the elders, though, the people who simply had grown too old and their souls became detached from their bodies. These always liked to give Yehudiah a little wisdom as they walked together, and that is how, of all the angels, the psychopomp knew more about the humans than anyone.

It was quite a bit of work though, teleporting all over the continent to each person who died every day, trying to make it personal, you know, good customer service. After all, they just _ died. _ The least you can do is listen to what they have to say. Humans bred like mice, it felt like, and there were increasingly more and more of them to lead, and it had taken a trip down south in order to relax a little. Smell the fresh salt air. Feel the morning moisture rise from beneath its toes to replenish the land. Look at some birds. Maybe a lion or two, those were neat. 

Well, it definitely seemed like something important was happening here, wasn't it. There was quite a large wooden thing in the middle of a clearing with lots of people standing around it and saying things that Yehudiah couldn’t quite hear from where it sat perched in a scrubby tree. A boat, they called it. Why would you need a boat all the way out here? And then they just marched a bunch of animals up into it, which was a feat in and of itself, if you asked Yehudiah. There had to be some divine intervention there, there was no way a leopard wouldn't make a snack of every single goat and impala in the vicinity other than if God told it not to.

That still didn’t make any sense, though, why would you put animals in a boat when there was no water?

Well, it found out, anyway.

  
  
  
  


“Wake me up when the world isn’t so wet,” Yehudiah moaned, flopping dramatically against the side of Azrael’s little rowboat. Its arms ached. Its lungs ached (and those weren’t even necessary.) Its legs ached, and its eyes burned from the sheer amount of salt and sand that had seeped into them in the last twenty-four hours.

“I imagine it will be a week or so. You know how God loves sevens,” said Azrael, slouched against the bow. Its normally stoic posture was loose and obvious. They were both exhausted.

“She could have given us a heads up,” Yehudiah said. “I wasn’t expecting to have to haul the entire Arabian peninsula up from the bottom of the newest section of the bloody ocean when I got up yesterday morning.”

“Yes, it is pretty extreme, coming up with the concept of rain specifically to drown people,” Azrael said. “But the humans  _ were _ pretty wicked.”

“Wicked enough to wipe them all off of the face of the planet?”

“Not _ all  _ of them, there’s still the rest of the world. Just the people here."

Yehudiah massaged its bicep and groaned. “ _ Feels _ like the whole world,” it whined.

“Well, at least now it seems we get a break. No more humans in this area to kill and cart off.”

“Who’s to say She won’t decide to drown the rest of Africa, too?”

“These are Her chosen people,” Azrael said. “Of course She’s gonna be a bit more frustrated with the eldest child. They should know better.”

Yehudiah gazed out over the water. There weren’t even any fish beneath the waves, the fresh water from the rain mixing in with the salty ocean, killing all the freshwater fish and driving away the saltwater ones. No food and no perch sent the birds off beyond the horizon. There was no life within Yehudiah’s vision, nothing stirring besides Azrael, and it was debatable if angels counted as living beings at all.

“So, a week, huh?” it asked, dipping its fingers into the cold, muddy water. “What on earth are we gonna do for a whole week.”

Azrael pulled its hood up over the void where its face should be. “There is no rest for death,” it said solemnly. “But you did say you wanted a nap.”

Yehudiah yawned widely. “I did, didn’t I. I feel like I deserve a little break; I've worked hard.”

The boat rocked gently as Azrael disappeared, leaving Yehudiah snoring softly in the floorboards as the sun began to peek out from behind the blanket of clouds above.

  
  
  
  
  


Yehudiah slept for a whole week and woke up extremely sunburnt. It stared at its crisp, red arms for several seconds completely flabbergasted. Who up in Heaven made it so these bodies could get sunburnt? What a grievous oversight in its opinion. Fortunately, it was an angel, so all it had to do was snap its fingers and its skin ceased looking like an over-boiled lobster, the itchiness subsiding.

It took stock of its surroundings then, sitting up in the boat. Well, there was still a whole lot of water, but off in the distance Yehudiah could see the peak of one of those big hills (the humans called them mountains, but Yehudiah had _ seen _ mountains, and these really were just big hills. You could breathe on top of them, for God’s sake), which meant there wasn’t quite as much water as there was last time.

“Well that’s lovely,” it muttered to itself. “Lot of water to go down in a few days.”

It gave itself a pair of oars and got all the way to the base of the peak before it realized it could have much more easily just teleported over there and avoided getting sweaty and tired. It pulled the boat up against the rocks and hiked its way up to the top, setting its arms akimbo and taking a look around. Not much to see but the tops of a few other mountains. Still no birds, still no fish. Definitely no people. And Azrael had gone off to do whatever it is Death does all day. Kill things, it guessed.

Well. Not much to do but nap some more. The last nap was  _ spectacular _ , outside of the sunburn, and Yehudiah was determined to make the next nap even better, so it snapped the boat up to the peak and tipped it upside down. It crawled underneath, curled up against a particularly comfortable rock, and passed out again.

  
  
  
  


When it woke up again, it definitely felt like it’d been much more than a couple of days. Yehudiah stretched, yawned, then scuttled out from beneath the boat to get a better view.

_ Wow _ , it thought.  _ This is gorgeous _ . Truly creation was something to behold. The sky was such a perfect blend of pink and purple and blue and gold, the sun sending rays out across the water, which glittered with its light. It loved sunsets. Truly God’s best work.

It stood and watched until dusk, the last rays of light disappearing beneath the waves. It was so quiet, up here. No life around it, no birds in the sky. Nothing but the gentle breeze and the lap of the waves against the rock. Waves that were, at least, quite a bit lower than they had been when it had gone to bed.

Yehudiah leaned forward, peering over the peak to the rest of the mountain below, trying to gauge the depth of the water based on where it had been previously, squinting against the rapid onset of darkness. It was looking so incredibly hard, that it nearly fell off of the mountain when it saw the thing sitting against a rock near the water. It looked up at Yehudiah when it yelped in surprise, eyes locking with the angel above it. Two glowing beams in the darkness below.

Usually when one sees eyes in the night that means it’s an animal. But this wasn’t an animal. This thing’s eyes were literally  _ glowing _ , like lights, casting shadows on the rock around it. And this thing with literal glowing eyes was not showing up in Yehudiah’s supernatural soul vision, which was probably the most concerning thing it had ever experienced in its admittedly very short life.

Yehudiah had never seen a demon before, but that was clearly the only explanation for what it was seeing.

It puffed up its wings and straightened its shoulders, yelling down at the thing below it. “Hark, demon, let it be known that I am a Stronghold with the power to smite you back to the pits of Hell from which you came! If you set one foot towards me I will strike you down with all of God’s wrath I can summon!”

“I think you have made a mistake,” said the thing in, amazingly, Enochian. The sound of it sent prickles up Yehudiah’s neck. Did demons speak their language? “I’m not a demon,” the thing finished.

“That is quite a lot like what a demon would say,” Yehudiah called down.

The thing held out its hands, and with a flourish, spread out behind it an absolutely massive set of dusty gray wings, long and tapered like an eagle’s, built to soar. “My name is Sorush,” it said. “I’m an Ophanim.”

“Don’t know an Ophanim by that name,” said Yehudiah, hoping this Sorush did not pick up on the fact that it did not know any Ophanim at all.

“I assure you I am,” Sorush said. “Even if we have not met.”

“What’s your platoon?”

“I’m actually the major,” Sorush said. “But I command the 6th Infantry.”

Yehudiah whistled. 6th Infantry. Damn. The world was new but Heaven’s armies had been increasing ever since the Rebellion. To command a single-digit infantry meant if this guy was telling the truth, they were not only a few hundred years older than Yehudiah (after all, death was a relatively new concept in the universe,) but they were also  _ important _ . 

And they were probably telling the truth.

Yehudiah drifted down the mountain on magpie’s wings, its descent controlled and slow, air catching underneath its broad span. Sorush followed it with their eyes as it landed gracefully in front of them, peering at their clothing in the dark. Standard angel fare, it seemed. Robe, sword, little pin at the neck that let everyone know what rank they were. It seems the Ophanim wasn’t lying, either - their pin was of the soon to be iconic interlocked wheels, sure enough.

“Do the eyes help with the whole. Overseeing the affairs of angels, or whatever it is Ophanim do?”

“I bestow judgement on humans; angels are no concern of mine. I believe you may be thinking of Dominions.”

“Whatever.”

“But yes,” Sorush said. “The eyes help me. That is why I am here, after all, to observe my handwork.”

Yehudiah looked out over the water. “Your work?”

“Yes,” said Sorush. “It is my job to judge the humans. It is important for me to see that I am effective at my job.”

“ _ You _ did all this?”

“At God’s request.”

“You drowned the whole world…”

“The humans were wicked,” Sorush said simply. “God asked me to punish them, so I did.”

“ _ You’re _ the reason I had to work a full day straight!” Yehudiah exclaimed, rounding on Sorush. “You and your rain. Did you come up with the name, too?”

Sorush just stared at it. “I did not name the rain. Are you Azrael?”

“What? No, I’m not Azrael, do I look like Death?” Yehudiah tapped the double winged pin on its neck. “I’m a Stronghold, I told you.”

“You are wearing dark robes. You work with Death.”

“Very observant," Yehudiah said, sarcastically. "I’m a psychopomp. I get to lead the souls of this district to wherever it is God decides they’re supposed to go. Usually Purgatory, since most of them don’t have missionaries yet.”

“That is why you are blaming me for giving you so much work.” Sorush nodded. “I would apologize but I am doing my God-given job and therefore I am not sorry.”

“Of course you aren’t,” Yehudiah grumbled. “First Sphere don’t have empathy.”

“It’s not exactly necessary for me to have empathy,” Sorush said. 

Yehudiah made a face. “Lucky you. Empathy is a huge part of my job description. And it sucks. I understand the whole ‘you need to be understanding and make the dead people feel better about being dead’ but after about oh, what’s the population of Mesopotamia? Or rather  _ was _ ? Anyway, after that many it starts to get a little exhausting to hear them...y’know. Be sad. All day.”

Sorush was looking at Yehudiah with no expression whatsoever. “That sounds vexing, yes.”

Yehudiah shrugged. “Well, I’ve had a decent week or so of vacation, anyway. Since, y’know, nothing’s alive anymore.”

“It took you all month to send the souls to their resting places?”

“What?”

“It has been…” Sorush waved a hand, a gold pocket watch appearing in it. “Twenty-six days since the rain fell.”

Yehudiah was flabbergasted. “I have been asleep for a  _ month? _ "

“Well, there has not been much else for you to be doing.”

“It only felt like a few days…”

Sorush looked up at the rock behind them, illuminating the little rowboat nestled on a cliff about fifty feet above with their eyes. “If you are able to sleep you may want to try it again, unless you have plans elsewhere. Judging from how fast the water is descending from this mountain, I imagine there’s another month or so before this region is livable again.”

“I’m gonna magic myself a bed, then.”

“Whatever makes you comfortable. I need to go check the fallout in other places, so I will be leaving.”

“I hope we never meet again,” Yehudiah said, giving Sorush a sarcastic sneer. “I don’t want to have to work this much,  _ ever _ .”

“Well, we can always hope that this time the humans listen better,” Sorush said. “Goodbye.”

And with a spark of holy light they disappeared, leaving Yehudiah standing on the top of the mountain alone, just below the water line.


	4. Devil, Farmer (2020)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Sorush pointed at the box of peeping chicks. “You cannot convince me that there is no mischief involved in this.”  
>  “Swear on my wings.”  
> “Swear what on your wings.”  
> Itza grit its teeth. “That the only mischief I pulled was to get myself at the front of the line so I had first pick.”  
> “Itza!”  
> _
> 
> Itza gets antsy and indulges in some retail therapy. Requested by a friend on a Discord server!
> 
> words: 3669  
> warnings: none

“Really, darling, was this necessary?”

Sorush stood on the porch, arms akimbo, staring down at Itza and the box it held in its hands. The box that was currently peeping very loudly.

Itza shook the box gently, jostling the birds inside. “Yes, it was. We’re in a pandemic, angel, or haven’t you noticed. Food is about to become a precious commodity; we need to make sure we can still eat when the world goes to hell. I survived one apocalypse, I’m not about to die in this one.”

“Itza, we survived  _ all  _ the pandemics. We don’t need to eat, and we don’t get sick, and we certainly won’t die through normal means. There is literally no reason for you to have bullied some poor panicking humans out of their chicks at the farm store.”

“I didn’t bully anyone, I put my name on the reservation form like everyone else.”

Sorush pointed at the box of peeping chicks. “You cannot convince me that there is no mischief involved in this.”

“Swear on my wings.”

“Swear  _ what  _ on your wings.”

Itza grit its teeth. “That the only mischief I pulled was to get myself at the front of the line so I had first pick.”

_“Itza!_ ”  
It gesticulated with one arm, attempting to hold the chicks steady with the other. “There was a line all the way out of the door! There’s no way I’m standing in the rain for two hours while everyone picks over the fun breeds!”

Sorush snatched the box from the demon’s hand. “Give me those before they all have heart attacks.” They sighed. “I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it now, you’ve brought them home. We’ll have to get a bin set up with a light and such for them.”

“Yeah, I made sure to get all the lights and food and stuff. Bought one of those big metal doodads to put ‘em in, too, it’s in the back of the car. You should’ve seen the warehouse guy’s face when I told him to put it in the boot of my car, it was priceless.”

“We really need to get a pickup truck if you’re going to be coming home with animals now,” Sorush sighed.

“I cannot think of a single vehicle less sexy than a pickup truck. I would rather ground myself for the rest of my life than drive a pickup truck. I’d be more comfortable in one of your jackets than in a pickup truck. Hell, a pink sundress would be more believable than-”

“Okay, okay,” Sorush interrupted. “But the humans will start to wonder how they can fit entire bales of hay into a Mustang boot eventually.”

Itza tapped its temple. “Not if I keep making them forget.”

Sorush’s shoulders stiffened. “Just because we’ve determined it’s safe to use magic again doesn’t mean you can just flash it around willy-nilly to get your way all the time.”

“Angel, I’m not sure if you remember, but I am a demon. Using magic to get my way all the time is literally in my job description. I’ve been doing it since the day I woke up in the sulfur lake, so why have you gotten your britches in a knot about it today?”

The chicks had calmed in Sorush’s hand, the angelic aura emanating from them soothing their tiny but nonetheless valid fears. “We don’t _ need  _ these, Itza. We can go decades without eating and be perfectly fine, but the humans  _ do _ need to be concerned with food security. You may have taken away someone’s opportunity to feed their family, all because you felt like having some birds.”

Itza slumped, its hair falling over one eye. “I just wanted to try it, okay? I’m fucking bored out here, away from civilization, even if we weren’t in lockdown. There’s always something going on in the city, but out here it’s just get up, feed horses, drink tea, watch TV, go ride around a little, drink more tea, watch more TV, check Twitter, try not to pick my own fingers off as the death count rises, drink some more tea-”

Sorush cut it off again. “You’ve made your point. I still wish you’d gone on Craigslist, though, rather than pushing someone out of a line at the feed store.”

“Have you seen what people are charging for chicks on there? It’s borderline evil, I tell you. The price gouging on birds is ridiculous. I should get in on it.”

“I would rather you not contribute to the artificial inflation of the price of chickens,” Sorush said, eyes narrowed. “Though it wouldn’t be a bad way to make them worth the money you’ve spent on them.”

“The money I’ve spent on them will be repaid by the wealth of delicious and nutritious eggs they will lay and the succulent flesh they will provide in twelve to sixteen weeks should we decide to eat them,” Itza said, offended.

Sorush sighed. “And I’m sure I’ll have to cook them as well.”

  
  
  
  


They lived together in a little house on a hill, right in the middle of five and some change acres in the Pacific Northwest just south of the Washington/Oregon border, hidden in the cedars and the firs. It was nearly impossible to see the driveway from the little back road they lived on, and even if you had, it was so long and winding that nearly everyone who accidentally turned onto it always felt incredibly creeped out and left within minutes. Something about the way the trees leaned over the drive, or the way the shadows danced between the leaves made the hair on the back of the neck prickle and a dryness set in the mouth. The postal workers typically left packages near the entrance.

There was a small but well maintained little garden in the back yard that Sorush had been taking great pleasure in tending, both for the experience of watching green things grow from seed to the sheer number of insects naturally drawn to crops. Itza’s current descendant of Hepburn the racehorse grazed contentedly in the pasture, her last filly, now nearly old enough to be ridden herself, dozing in the sun beside her. But other than Sorush, (and it was truly debatable if either the angel or the demon were truly alive in the traditional sense,) and the wildlife, there were no other living beings on the property. No ducks in the pond behind the house, no rabbits in hutches in the barn. And definitely no chickens pecking around the rhododendron bushes growing beneath the bedroom window.

“Now listen here, you little shits,” Itza said, leveling a finger at the cluster of fluffy day-old chicks. “If any of you feel like dying, don’t. Because I am the god of death on this farm, and I paid good money for your asses, and I would like to get some return on my investment.”

The chicks continued to peep at one another and scratch at the wood shavings, unimpressed with whatever the weird human looking thing was saying. They startled in a scuttling mass as the screen door swung open with a creak.

“How are the loyal subjects?” asked Sorush, leaning through the doorway. Their shirtsleeves were rolled up to their elbows, an apron tied around their waist. The smell of dust and cleaners wafted through to Itza’s sensitive nose.

“Obstinate,” said Itza. “None of them recognize my authority as the one who holds their lives in my hands. That I could kill them on a whim with a thought, a wave of my hand. They just run around and peep and eat tiny bits of corn and garbage and occasionally peck each others’ eyeballs.”

“Fickle beings, chickens. It must be hard for you to not be able to intimidate something into doing what you want it to do.”

“You have no earthly idea. I feel that birds may be beyond my abilities.”

“Strange considering we are not at all unlike them,” Sorush said. “I’m assuming our bones are not hollow as we fly through supernatural means, but featherless bipeds we are not.”

“Speak for yourself, I’m no chicken. For one, I got magpie wings. I’ve never seen a chicken with magpie wings before.”

“I’ve never seen a beige eagle before either, but that does not mean that I am not at least a little bit related to them.”

“Yeah, but eagles aren’t chickens either, even if you are some weird unique species probably never created because whatever it was was the one God was about to make when five o’clock rolled around on bird day and She decided it was fine and drinks with the lads was more important.”

Sorush decided to ignore the probable blasphemy. “That’d be rather nice, wouldn’t it. To be something the world has never seen and will never see again.”

“Technically every single thing that’s ever set foot on this earth is completely unique and never seen before,” Itza said. 

The angel gave it a soft smile. “Some are more unique than others.”

Long white scars trailed up from the fingertips on Itza’s right hand, twisting around its wrist like a fading tattoo before disappearing beneath the sleeve of its shirt. The skin of its palm was thin and pinched, the texture smoothed out like a statue that’d been touched by too many passers-by. The imprint of a snake was still wrapped around its pinkie finger.

It’d never forget, would it.

“I suppose I’ll have to teach them to fly one day, won’t I?” Itza said. “When they’re old enough.”  
“Chickens don’t fly,” Sorush said, catching the distant look in Itza’s eyes, the quick change of subject. “Especially not the ones made for meat. They’re far too heavy.”

“I don’t even know if these are for meat or not. I just grabbed one of each they had at the farm store without really looking at the labels.”

“You really should pay attention to what you are doing sometimes, especially when it comes to owning livestock.”

Itza watched the fuzzy little birds bundle together beneath their heat lamp, eyes heavy with sleep. “They’re just chickens, how different can they be?”

  
  
  
  
  


While Sorush may be quick to remind Itza that they did not need to eat, they found a simple satisfaction in being able to set something on the table for dinner, especially now that restaurants were closed. Neither of them were particularly good cooks - centuries of eating out or just not eating at all didn’t exactly prepare them for the lifestyle they’d chosen - but when they had some kind of crop ripen, Sorush would light the ancient woodstove and make something edible out of it, whether by their own skill or a miracle. Itza hovered around them in the kitchen, possibly intending to help but mostly just getting in the way, giving tips and tricks it had read online but never tested out because despite having complete control over fire, both demonic and natural, it wasn’t very good at knowing when to stop applying said fire to food. Itza enjoyed the finer things of human life, like food, and drink, and smoking, but it let someone else handle the manufacture of said imbibements. No sense in setting off all of the smoke alarms (though it was a good test of the system, initially.)

Sorush found the work relaxing, to have their hands in the earth, watching things grow. And, of course, the diverse amount of insect life in the garden was thrilling. It was quiet out here, away from the city. It had been a little difficult to grow accustomed to, the silence of nature, after the constant sensory barrage of New York, day and night. The most exciting thing to happen out here was the time a small herd of deer stopped to snack on some of the wild berries growing between the trees. It was easy to let your mind wander here. Their months on the glacier had been fraught with worry; worry about Itza’s arm not healing, worry about Heaven and Hell coming to take them away again, worry that the world was only going to end anyway. But now, it seemed the planet would keep spinning just as it always had. The sun would rise, the humans would unleash some deadly plague upon the world, and Sorush would have to find something to occupy themself with in order to not think too much about how they weren’t consulted on it, again, and Itza would go buy a box full of chickens because it was better to care for something small and helpless than to pick the skin off of its fingers when it’d only just started to heal.

Regardless, Itza was not allowed in the garden. While it was very good at caring for animals, its hand gentle but unrelenting, its ability to communicate ideas and concepts directly to them a powerful tool in the stables, it was absolutely useless at growing anything green. Whatever the opposite of a green thumb is, that’s what Itza had. Only the hardiest houseplants were able to withstand whatever curse had been placed upon the demon’s fingers, but it seemed that if it even so much as looked at a crop it would wilt in an instant. And so, it was banned from setting foot within the garden gate. Now, it did not appreciate being excluded from any part of the property it had worked so hard creating money to afford, and after two seasons of failed crops, Sorush had placed a ward on the door to keep the demon out.

So it was a bit of a problem when Sorush put on their apron and their clogs and went out to pick some vegetables for that evening’s dinner, and found a chicken staring up at them.

Over the weeks, Itza’s brood of little brown and yellow peeping fuzzballs turned into something that actually resembled birds, their yellow down replaced by a rainbow of feathers and combs and personalities. They now, in their teenage plumage not quite all grown in, pecked around the yard in a scattered flock, clucking happily to themselves and taking dust baths in the patches of sunlight that filtered through the trees. There were so many bugs that they barely needed to be fed grain at all anymore, their crops pendulously full by the end of the day with very little input from either caretaker, a far cry from the horses. Sorush was, surprisingly, a little in love with them.

But not when they were in the garden.

The jet black cockerel looked up at them with shining eyes, head cocked to better gaze upon the angel towering over him. He clucked unapologetically. The remnants of a tomato still clung to his beak.

“That,” Sorush said slowly, “Was for dinner.”

The cockerel clucked again, looking back over his shoulder at the tomato bush.

“Absolutely not, one was enough,” Sorush said, lunging for the chicken, who squawked and took a quick flutter-step away from the angel’s clumsy hands.

They dusted themself off and regrouped. They were an Ophanim, an angel of judgement, one of God’s chosen. They would not be defeated by a chicken.

And yet, as they lunged again, the cockerel simply side-stepped them before fluttering up and onto the garden fence, croaking down at Sorush from his perch.

“I am perfectly able to reach up there and grab you,” Sorush said, doing exactly that.

The cockerel responded by launching into the air and flying straight up and into a nearby tree. He looked down at Sorush and puffed up his neck feathers before releasing an admittedly pathetic crow, but it managed to serve its purpose of taunting Sorush regardless.

“I can do that too, you know,” Sorush huffed, pulling off their apron and begrudgingly unbuttoning their shirt. They hadn’t let their wings loose in the sun since the fifteenth century for fear of inciting rumours, but here, deep in the woods, there was no one around to see them.

The cockerel sat in the tree and clucked at them as they folded the shirt neatly and draped it over the fence before shaking their wings out of their extradimensional hiding place and into the physical realm.

It felt good to stretch them again, to hold them at their full extension, well beyond Sorush’s fingertips were they to hold out their arms. The feathers were dusty gray-brown, the ghost of barring running down their lengths. Sorush beat them a few times, remembering the way the muscles flexed, how the tips of them whistled through the air. Their wings were huge, long and broad and shaped for soaring high above the earth and observing the destruction they were there to rain down upon civilization. Not so much for chasing chickens out of trees, but these were unprecedented times.

The cockerel seemed a bit taken aback. Not that he had seen too many humans in his few months of life, but he had at least not seen any of them sprout wings out of nowhere before. But then again, the ladies at the farm store he was purchased from didn’t project thoughts directly into his mind like the other, darker caretaker did, either.

He watched as Sorush walked underneath his perch, and with one mighty flap of their wings, launched themselves straight up. Leaves and grass seeds and more than one tuft of dandelion erupted into the air beneath them, but the cockerel’s eyes were locked onto Sorush’s, and he could swear they were glowing. These caretakers were so strange.

He was so shocked, in fact, to see the caretaker fly, that he didn’t even react for a moment when Sorush’s hands wrapped around him, plucking him from the tree branch and bringing him back down to earth with them.

Sorush considered both the cockerel and the branch he’d been sitting on. It was probably ten, fifteen feet up, and the tree itself was at least twenty feet from the garden fence. In other words, this chicken had flown. Really, actually flown.

The cockerel had realized he was in a predicament now, beating his wings against Sorush’s chest and struggling to be free, and so the angel gently tossed him over the garden fence, watching transfixed as he fluttered to the ground in a huff. The sunlight turned his iridescent feathers green and blue as he darted into a bush. Just like Itza’s, without the white tips.

“Like parent like son,” came Itza’s voice from the back porch, and Sorush looked up to see the demon leaning over the railing, seemingly having been there for quite a while, silently watching Sorush struggle to catch a rogue cockerel.

“You could have told it to leave the tree at least,” Sorush huffed. “Would have saved me some embarrassment.”

“More fun to watch you get half naked,” Itza said. “It’s always a rare and delightful treat.”

“I’ll have no more of your lascivious tongue, demon,” Sorush said, but their words held no venom.

The cockerel joined Itza on the porch, perching on its shoulder and clucking contentedly. It scratched him gently around the head with one finger, cooing to him gently.

“Did you know that he can actually fly?” Sorush asked, their wings disappearing from their shoulders as they pulled their shirt and apron back on.

“Oh, yeah, his breed is known for it,” Itza replied nonchalantly. “They’re some of the best flyers out there. He’ll probably get even better at it as he grows, too. Builds muscle and all. He’s gonna be a pretty big boy.”

“That is not relieving to me in the slightest, considering he ate all of my tomatoes. You need to tell him not to go in the garden anymore.”

“I mean I can ask nicely, but he is a chicken, and they kinda just do as they please. I can just suggest things, I can’t mind control them.”

“If you are interested in having tomatoes for your salads, I suggest you suggest to him that he stay out of the garden. Or I may have to put up anti-chicken wards as well as anti-demon ones.”

Itza and the cockerel both looked surprised. “You can do that?”

“I’ve never done it before, but I’ve done many things I’ve never done before recently, haven’t I. If I can figure out how to spell ‘chicken’ in Enochian, I’m pretty sure I can get it done.”

“How would you spell ‘chicken’ in Enochian? Is there even a word for chicken these days? There is in Demonic, but how often do angels talk about chickens?”

“How often do  _ demons _ talk about chickens?” Sorush asked, genuinely curious.

The cockerel on its shoulder ruffled his feathers. “More often than you might think,” Itza said. “It turns out agriculture is a big point of conversation Downstairs, and chickens are often at the top of the ‘animals that humans are very very mean to’ list.”

“Fascinating. I wonder if I used the Demonic word in my sigil if it’d work or if I’d just catch the entire fence on fire.”

“Won’t know until you try. I’ll put it out if you do, unless angel fire is like, untouchable by demons. Then you’re on your own.”

There was a pop as Sorush summoned themself a piece of chalk from the sewing nook. “Stay close, just in case, but not too close. If this goes awry I would rather not like either of you to explode.”

Itza sighed, putting a hand on the back of the cockerel, still on its shoulder. “Come on Raphael Jr., let’s let the angel do their work. Wouldn’t want to be set alight with holy flame, would we.”

Sorush looked up from where they were scratching lines and letters into the wood of the garden gate. “You named your rooster after an Archangel?”

Itza barely flinched as the cockerel launched from its shoulder, flying gracefully to the roof of the house where he let out another reedy crow.

“It was the evilest thing I could think of.”


	5. Prompt:  Heat Lightning (2005)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: smoking, mention of drug and alcohol abuse, panic attack, hurricane katrina (which i'm AMAZED is a tag)  
> words: 3057
> 
> _They didn’t know that the person at the bar next to them with the red hair and dark glasses was really their harbinger. That its mere presence in the city meant that it wouldn’t go as smoothly as they thought._
> 
> Itza goes on assignment by itself to New Orleans, and has a weird time of it. I ended up mildly trigger myself writing this, as someone who lived in Houston during Harvey :')

It’d been a long time since Itza had stepped foot this close to the Tropic of Cancer. Normally when it stepped through the doors at the end of Hell’s innumerable hallways it was a breath of fresh air, literally, but this time it felt exactly the same. Walking from hot, stagnant underground air into a hot, humid breeze blowing through some crumbling back alley. The smell of coffee, thick and black with flecks of red chicory, the sound of jazz echoing through the backlot of whatever building Be-elzebub had managed to conjure up the money to buy as a front.

This wasn’t its first trip to New Orleans. For a while it’d felt like very few years Downstairs was sending it up to sweep up after yet another hurricane, maybe dip its toes into that whole “murder capital of the country” thing, stir the pot up. Bring some more to Hell’s gates. More fuel for the fires. More fodder for the army. This trip was no different. It could smell the tension in the air, but the city sang on regardless, like it had so many times before.

The demon wasn’t dressed for August in Louisiana. This was no weather for sleeves, or shorts that went anywhere near mid-thigh. This wasn’t really weather for clothes at all, but Itza would take a bath in holy water before it let anyone catch it naked that wasn’t Sorush. And in all reality they would probably wouldn’t even register the nudity and continue to ask Itza some question about soup, or the climate of Gärds Köpinge, Sweden, or what the mortality rate of the Amami rabbit was in 1789.

The point was, Itza was sweaty. Note to self, purchase a tank top and burn this button-down.

It drifted out of the alley and onto the main street. The smell of coffee was joined by a cacophony of scents and subsequent colours - sweet baked goods, multitudinous seafoods drowned in spices, sweat, alcohol, motor oil, and hot concrete, all set against a backdrop of the dark dirty Mississippi’s waters. The sun was setting rapidly, the lights bright in the bars and restaurants, the street teeming with humans. It wasn’t Bourbon Street, but it was the French Quarter. Somehow Itza wasn’t surprised the gates of Hell were here, in this ward. The place was thick with sin in all flavours.

A three-man jazz band stood on a street corner and set the soundtrack of the city, accordion and trumpet joined by a man with fingers that flew over the frets of his fiddle almost frantically. The sound was interesting, not the typical vibe of the city that Itza remembered, relying on brass and bass and drums over the more Appalachian style strings. Itza liked it. It had a soft spot for fiddles, as most demons do.

The city was not asleep, but it was on edge. The oppressive heat of summer had finally broken (or so they said; Itza, having sweat through its shirt twice over, was not sure it agreed), the promise of September’s cooler winds on the horizon, and the humans wanted one last drink before they shuttered their windows. The radios and televisions were projecting the storm whipping through the gulf to reach Category Five by landfall, calling desperately for evacuation. The humans were anxious, but they’d done this before. What’s another hurricane? So what if it’s huge.

They didn’t know that the person at the bar next to them with the red hair and dark glasses was really their harbinger. That its mere presence in the city meant that it wouldn’t go as smoothly as they thought. 

They’d forgotten the power of nature’s uncaring. It’d been thirteen years since Andrew had ripped through Acadiana, its winds so powerful they rippled brick walls, its waters so tumultuous they unearthed graves. Or maybe they just couldn’t leave, not enough money in their pockets to buy enough gas to flee somewhere else. To Texas to the West, to Arkansas to the north; not out of the way of the storm, but surely they would suffer less of her wrath so far inland.

Itza didn’t really care why the humans were still here, serving drinks in the evening the day before a storm. It was here to do a job and not much more. The air in the bar was thick with smoke and Itza joined, trying to steady its shaking hands. It didn’t like being alone anymore, its tics louder and anxieties deeper when Sorush wasn’t there. Maybe it was the angelic presence making everything nicer through some kind of celestial magic. Maybe it really was just in love with them. It just hated that it was in this bar without them.

The bartender kept a keen eye on the amount of drinks on Itza’s tab, and after four it thanked him, tipped well, and left to find the next one. The cicadas in the trees screamed for mates as Itza walked alone, the drift of jazz following the rise and fall of their calls. The air was still so heavy and hot even after the sun had gone down, Itza’s shirt still clinging to its back. The alcohol sat uncomfortably in its belly, making it sweat more, fingers tingling as its blood grew thinner.

Human imbibements worked differently on demons. Angels, too, but they were much less likely to overindulge. Itza had never seen Sorush drunk, or high, or anything except how they always were. A little vacant on the outside, sharp as a hawk on the inside. Shame the same couldn’t be said for Itza. But not everyone heard the voices of the dead and dying in their mind with no other way to shut it out. Itza’s body was ostensibly mortal, with a brain and a heart and blood that pumped through veins and organs that digested food, should it decide to eat or drink at all. It felt emotions, it felt pain. But it had looked the same since the day it was created, the same face, same lines behind its eyes. Its skin never touched by sun or wind or age. Its hair still as thick as it’d always been, even if the colour had changed after its dip in the sulfur lake. Time didn’t matter to demons or angels. Neither did death, its soul (if that's what you could call it,) completely separate from the body it inhabited. If Itza got on the wrong side of a bullet the worst that would happen is it would spend a week or so in administrative (and literal) Hell, curled up in snake form in some warm corner of the office, waiting for another body to be assigned to it. Poison did nothing but make it dizzy and spit up foam.

So it did whatever it liked to its body without consequence. Enough drinks to kill a human, hopping from bar to bar so it didn’t get blacklisted. Enough cigarettes to send a human to the morgue but demons’ lungs didn’t fill with tar. Enough drugs to lay an elephant out but magic was better than a liver any day.

Itza lit a cigarette out on the street with its fingertips, watching the people go by. Most of the buildings had boarded up windows, even if the doors were still open. Clinging to that last bit of semblance of normality. That calm before the storm. They did it every time. Itza knew.

It switched the hand it held its cigarette in with every drag, trying and failing to prevent itself from picking the skin off its thumbs. It wasn’t even loud yet, not really, but the anticipation was enough. It wished they were here. It could call them - send a little text their way and they’d pop in right next to Itza and make anyone who saw forget. They wouldn’t even ask, just launch into a monologue about some flora or fauna that Itza didn’t care about necessarily but their voice would distract them just enough.

“I can cancel,” Sorush had said, pausing in the middle of pulling on their overcoat, even though it was August. “If you need me to. The museum can wait.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Itza said, shoving its hands into its pockets. “I’ll only be there for a day or two anyway.”

“But it’s New Orleans, and a hurricane…” They trailed off.

“It’ll probably flood, I know. It’s fine.” Itza wasn’t looking at them. It had forced Sorush to cancel plans the last four times it’d had to work floods, and the guilt was catching up.

“Are you certain?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Itza stubbed out its cigarette on the brick wall behind it and lit another. It wasn’t fine. But Sorush didn’t need to know that.

A group of humans standing in the middle of the street suddenly looked up at the sky, oohing and ahhing. It’d been overcast all day, the far reaches of the storm creeping over the city. Itza peered up, following their fingers, to the glowing underbelly of the clouds, reflecting the bright neon lights. It watched for several seconds and almost looked away, until it saw the silent flash and flicker, followed by another round of awe from the humans. A few others looked up, but were not impressed. That group must be tourists.

Itza knew what it was, but it was no less interesting. The reflection of far-away storms in the ice crystals locked in clouds, a light show without the thunder. The humans called it heat lightning, as it was common on hot, humid days. The kind of day that was every day in the deep South summer.

It wondered if Sorush had ever seen it on their journeys, those decades they spent alone just seeing what the world had to offer in the beginning of their extended time off from Heaven’s duties. It wondered what they’d thought about as the sky flashed around them with no sound to accompany it. It wished they were here next to them, to press its shoulder into theirs and listen as they tried to describe the colours of the clouds and how the lightning changed the hue from within. But they had a conference to speak at, and Itza wasn’t taking that away from them. Not again.

“Do you think that’s from Katrina?” one of the tourists asked.

Hurricanes don’t have lightning, not usually anyway. Lightning is formed by ice and water rubbing together in the tops of cumulonimbus clouds, the static buildup discharging in bolts, the thunder the sonic boom of exploding air. Hurricane clouds are long and thin, fingers reaching out in the typical cyclone shape. They came with wind and rain and sometimes tornadoes. But almost never lightning.

Demons didn’t care for thunderstorms. Angels could summon lightning, crackling down like a bolt from the blue to aid their teleportation or to smite those they disproved of. These bolts were silent, usually, maybe a little “pop” as the air was sucked back into the space they used to occupy, but the association with thunder was still strong.

But that was for demons who didn’t spend all of their time around angels. For the ones that didn’t associate the smell of copper and ozone with the jump of the heart you try to convince yourself is nothing. For those who didn’t sit in the rain despite the panic and pretend the thunder threatening to burst its eardrums was Sorush come to take it away from whatever tragedy was unfolding before its eyes.

Itza watched the reflections of far away lightning crackle and shine in the clouds and wished it hadn’t been selfless for once in its life. That it hadn’t told Sorush it would be okay if they didn’t come with it. That it weren’t here in New Orleans chain smoking by itself in front of a bar of people that will either be dead or destitute by sunset tomorrow.

The night felt like a façade, a piece of a set that’ll be torn down and put into storage after the curtains fall on the last show, the people all around it actors who will wash off their makeup and pull off their wigs and change their clothes and go home. The heat and the sweat was from the stage lights above disguised as shop neons, the space behind the bar windows empty. The smell of imminent rain on the horizon, thick and blue-black. Itza paid too much attention to detail when it was alone. It didn’t realize it’d broken its skin until it went to switch its cigarette to the other hand and saw its thumb smeared in dark gray.

It sucked the blood off of its thumb and took solace in knowing nobody had noticed, or if they had, nobody cared. That’s why it loved cities. There was a reason it had picked London, New York, as the places it would haunt. Cities, for all their being hubs of plagues and pestilence, were also places that brought humans together from far and wide. One could walk merely a block in Manhattan and find themselves in a brand new culture, speaking a brand new language. Turn another and the streets were illuminated in red lights, the sound of heels on cobblestone. No one looked twice at the demon in all black in the middle of summer, its body ambiguously shaped. No one batted an eye when the angel standing next to it took its hand in theirs and led them into yet another SoHo antique store to shop for bell jars or shadowboxes, the snake brooch on their lapel glinting in the sun. The doormen of their apartments knew the other by name. Itza’s had left it a bottle of champagne by the door last Valentine’s day, a bow wrapped around the neck, and for once Itza’s heart hadn’t stopped beating to know that someone knew. You didn’t get that in the country. In the country, the presence of a stranger in dark clothes was seen more as the omen it often was than just another face in a crowd. In the country, when nobody had anything else to do, they would notice the colour of someone’s eyes. They would notice when you call your companion “angel.”

Cities meant more dead, though. A blessing and a curse. No one to see Itza as it was, but it kept getting assigned to high population areas, because that’s where people die the most. It was an odd form of trauma, to love the place it lived because it allowed a comfortable invisibility, but knowing that at any time the morgues were full and Itza could hear their lamentations even with Sorush next to it.

Itza wondered if it would peel the souls of these tourists off of IH-10 on Monday, drowned in their cars trying to flee on congested highways. If they’d stay in the city, stranded on a rooftop, calling for the coast guard to take them to the Superdome for a sandwich and a blanket to lay on. If they’d make it to the airport and back to wherever they came from, safe and sound. Feeling as though they’d cheated death, but really they’d just been lucky. No one cheats death, not really. It always comes for them in the end.

Drops landed on Itza’s skin and the people around it began to shuffle to the edges of the street, ducking under awnings. The smell of anxiety of the humans rose in the air like a petrichor. This was it. The beginning of the end. Take what you could and run, or stay and see how high the water got before you remembered you didn’t know how to swim.

Itza liked thunder but it still hated rain. The endless drizzle of London or the fresh spring showers in New York were one thing. Even the summer squalls and their fifteen minutes of rage against an unjust sun were tolerable. But rain, _ real _ rain, the kind that beats against the window and turns the world outside into nothing but sickly dark water, that scared it. The kind of rain that brings floods and bursts levees, the kind that traps people beneath the surface or dashes them against the walls of the structures meant to protect them. The kind that makes Itza unable to think over the screaming.

It felt like Itza’s own personal hell, standing here on the brick paved street, watching the drizzle fall, breathing in the smell of gasoline and wet concrete and cigarette smoke, waiting on a hurricane to fill the soup bowl with what would turn out to be quite a lot of the Mississippi River. Did Heaven know, when it was thrown through those golden floors, that it would love one of theirs centuries down the road? Did Hell see the future in its eyes when it shot down from the sky, sending it to places where the lightning flashed but the water brought death and destruction as punishment for its ultimate sin? Did they conspire together to form this perfect torture, or was it just a coincidence, a cruel twist of fate?

Itza’s body shook uncontrollably as it stood frozen in the street, rain soaking through its clothes and flattening its hair, its eyes still turned up to the sky where the silent lightning still flickered through the clouds. Mocking it. Reminding it that no one was coming to save it. That it suffered alone, as it always had. The howl in its ears not wind nor the dead but the static in the mind of someone on the edge of panic. Its cigarette burned down to its fingers but it didn’t even feel it.

“Hey, ya know it’s rainin’ right?” said a voice to Itza’s left, snapping it back into its body, back to reality. Someone walking out of a bar, keys in his hand. Itza felt the burn now, and it flicked its wrist with a hiss, dropping what was left of its cigarette. It wouldn’t blister. Demons were fire resistant.

“Y’might wanna get inside pretty soon,” said the man. “There’s a storm comin’.”

Itza stared at him with wide eyes, its hold so loose on its mortal form that the serpent beneath seeped out through the cracks in the mask. “Yeah,” it said, wisps of hellsmoke drifting from its mouth. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Follow my other exploits on Twitter @kataouatche, and Tumblr @cataouatche!


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